It is the link between satisfaction and redress--the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy--that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire--make it literally unreal--with pictures of its satisfaction. Pornography, for example, can easily be used, among many other things, to pre-empt the elaboration of erotic fantasy; it can be, in Maud Khan's words, 'the stealer of dreams'. To put it in old-fashioned Freudian language, fantasies of satisfaction are defenses against desiring, the attempt in fantasy to take the risk out of desire; or to put it in more Iranian language, fantasies of satisfaction are attacks upon desire; they are, in fact, against desiring, both up against it and in opposition to it. Our fantasies of satisfaction are clues to our fears about desiring. Wishful fantasies are the original sins of omission.

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